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On the tiny Caribbean island of Mill Walk, a ten-year old boy named Tom Pasmore is tragically killed in a traffic accident- well, almost killed. Miraculously, he survives, but as he grows up the accident leads this brilliant boy to an obsession with death, and particularly two unsolved mysteries- one in the present, the murder of the sister of t... more »he island's finance minister; the other in the past, the murder of a neighbor and friend of Tom's grandfather in the resort town of Eagle Lake, Wisconsin. He is aided in his investigations by one of the great detectives in modern fiction- Lamont von Heilitz, known as "The Shadow," now retired and living as an eccentric and despised neighbor of Tom on Mill Walk, whose own fascination with the Eagle Lake death may have much more to it than mere intellectual curisioty. Indeed, it is difficult to know whose past is more closely linked to the murder- von Helitz's or Tom's family's.« less